Final Offering
by avanti90
Summary: After Escobar, Aral reflects on his family, his friends, and his failures.


"I need you to go down to Hassadar," said Piotr, as Aral began to open the last bottle. "There are some property disputes there that need to be sorted out. I thought you might start on it tomorrow."

Aral was only dimly aware that his father was saying something. He nodded automatically, refilling his glass for the third time.

"That's enough," said his father firmly. Aral went on filling the glass to its brim.

His father put out a hand and removed it from his reach. "Enough," he snapped. "How long are you going to keep this up? Look at yourself. Can't you see what you've become?"

Aral knew exactly what he looked like. He'd seen himself in the mirror. His hair was unkempt, his florid shirt was crumpled, his eyes were swollen and streaked with red and served him poorly, at best, at this particular moment.

He could make out a brown shape that was a liveried armsman, watching the scene uncomfortably from the corner. It wasn't the first such conversation he'd had with his father. Nowadays Aral had stopped arguing. It was much simpler to just drink and let his father talk for both of them.

"It's bad enough that you resigned your commission. At least you can do something useful with your life, instead of…" Piotr made a gesture of disgust in the direction of the bottle. "Why are you doing this to yourself?"

Aral got to his feet, slowly. The room swam around him for a moment before settling back into place. He ignored the glass and picked up the bottle, and walked out of the door. If his father said anything, it passed unheard.

It was very late, so late that even the night birds had retired to their nests. The only sound was the faint rustling of the wind as it threaded its way through the needle-like foliage of the old trees, a peaceful whisper that entirely failed to soothe Aral. He began a slow walk around the dark lake, hoping to distance himself from the house before his father decided to follow him.

The cold air began to clear his head a little, so Aral took a long drink from the bottle to unclear it. The wine was exceptional, he noted, silky and elegant and entirely too excellent to waste like this. He closed his eyes and let himself enjoy the flavor, and as a result nearly bumped into the stone wall.

His feet had brought him to the graveyard; entirely of their own accord, for it was the last place he would have chosen to go. Aral put his hand on the wall to steady himself as he looked out across the rows of dark graves. Mother, sister, brother, all were buried there. He'd be buried there someday.

It was a good place for them, serene, tranquil and immaculate. Aral remained standing beside the gate, unwilling to enter and face his ghosts in person.

_They had held the funeral on a bleak gray morning two years after the deaths, when it was safe to come home at last. His father had lit the pyre before the three old graves, piled high with offerings. Many of the guests had wept; Aral had not. All his tears had been shed long ago, leaving behind only a vast, aching emptiness in his heart that two years of bloodshed had not filled in the least._

_So he stood in silence between his father and grandfather as the flickering, crackling tendrils of flame slowly consumed the offerings. At last only ashes remained, and the mourners began to drift away one by one, each one pausing for a moment to offer their condolences to the bereaved Count. Some went to the young Lord Vorkosigan, to clasp his hand, or occasionally to touch his shoulder. Then they were all gone._

_His father had lingered for a moment beside the grave of his lost heir before turning away to rest his hand on his only son's shoulder._

_"The honor of our House rests in your hands, now," he had said. "Bear it well."_

Aral could almost taste the ashes at the back of his throat, bitter and acrid. The legacy of his life. He couldn't face his father anymore. He was too much of a coward to let the old man see what his second son had truly become.

He took another long swig from the bottle, and remembered.

_Aral looked out over the crowd in the vast ballroom and tried not to tremble. "Relax," Ges whispered laughingly in his ear._

_"I'm trying," Aral muttered back. He had never been so nervous in his entire life, not even in the middle of a battlefield. He would willingly choose a field of armed enemies over this endless waiting in the circle with hundreds of eyes fixed on him._

_Slowly the whispers in the crowd died out, and all the eyes turned away from him. Aral found himself turning without any conscious thought, his gaze drawn like a compass needle to the vision that stood before him._

_He knew at once that he would never forget the sight of her in that moment, standing there framed in the doorway, radiant in white and gold and surpassing beauty. He loved her in that moment; loved her beautiful face, loved her shining eyes and the way she looked directly at him instead of demurely downwards like a proper bride, loved the fluid grace with which she glided across the room to take his hands._

_He spoke the oaths automatically, barely conscious of the memorized words. They came easily to his lips. He would protect her, love her, cherish her._ _He was oblivious of the envious glances of all the men in the room as he took her in his arms and kissed her at last. The kiss lasted several seconds longer than was polite at a wedding, and when they drew apart at last her smile took his breath away._

_That smile had remained on her lips all day long._

_The last time he had seen her alive it was contorted into a cry of rage and hatred and grief, when he had left her weeping, too swept up in the darkness of his own rage to care what became of her. The next day he had seen her again, and there had been nothing left of that smiling face at all._

They had called it suicide, but they had whispered murder, and he knew that the whispers had been true. He had killed her as surely as if he had held the plasma arc to her forehead and pulled the trigger.

The wine was bitter in his mouth now, its subtle flavors overwhelmed by the sharp, overpowering taste of failure. A familiar taste; he knew it so well.

_"To Admiral Vorkosigan! To the youngest admiral in the fleet; and the very best!"_

_"You've had too much to drink," Aral had muttered, trying to hide his pleasure at his friend's words, trying not to show how much they meant to him. It was unlikely that there were any other admirals listening in the pub, but still._

_Rulf sat back and laughed. "I still can't believe you really wore it," he said, half-admiring, half-horrified as he stared at Aral's new and extremely flowery shirt._

_Aral looked down at the explosion of color, remembering his own horror and their laughter when he had opened it. But there was no way he could not wear it. Whatever success he had was due to the work of the men who had given it to him; this man most of all._

_"Thank you," he said. Rulf looked up in surprise._

_"Not for this thing," Aral added dryly. "For my promotion. For everything. None of it would have happened without you. None at all."_

_Rulf had been his first officer in his very first command. Their first days together had been hard and bitter as the older officer resented being passed over in favor of the great Vorkosigan's heir, but once they were past that, Rulf had been the one to teach Aral everything he needed to know. Even if Rulf refused to acknowledge it, Aral knew perfectly well that the triumphs that had brought him here were due more to Rulf's quiet diligence than to any brilliance on his commander's part. _

_Rulf had been silent for a few moments. "You've had too much to drink," he had answered at last, and Aral had laughed and agreed, seeing the half-concealed smile on his friend's lips._

Aral fingered the crumpled shirt again, thinking of the men who had given it to him. And other men – Korabik, and Aristede, and so many others. His friends, his men, his dead. He had come to know them so well in four years. He had visited their homes, attended their weddings, played with their children. Now he couldn't meet their eyes in his sleep.

He leaned back and rested against the wall. There was no sound and no person in the darkness around him. His father had evidently decided to let him be, for once. He was alone in the dark with his ghosts and his memories and his despair, with no means of finding solace or reprieve, only the imperfect relief that the wine could give him.

He was alone with his failure, his old and dear friend, the last one he had left.

The silence was broken by a humming noise in the air. Aral looked up and saw the pair of unmarked lightflyers hovering in the distance. ImpSec again. Hadn't Negri had enough of him yet? But no, they wouldn't even leave him his illusion of solitude.

His eyes passed over the lightflyers to the mountains beyond, remembering the endless days he had spent flying over them when he was younger, sometimes by himself and sometimes with Ges by his side. Though he had never dared to fly _in_ them. They were built of sheer cliffs and narrow canyons and sudden rocky outcrops, all making the most dangerous place for a lightflyer that Aral had ever known. A place where a man might easily fly at night, and not return home in the morning…

Aral stood there for a long while, gazing out into the distance, before he turned and raised the bottle to the distant graves. Then he drained the last drop of wine and walked away into the dark.

* * *

><p>They came to him in the night, as they always did when he hadn't drunk enough to shut them out. Ges, Renée, Korabik, Aristede, Rulf, all of them, all of his dead. They came to him and gazed at him through cold, accusing eyes, demanding the justice that he had failed to give them yet again.<p>

When he woke up at last, his head felt as though it was on fire, and Padma was sitting next to his bed. Aral blinked. He hadn't seen Padma in his dreams yet. Padma was still alive.

"You can't keep doing this to yourself, Aral," said Padma quietly.

_Can too, _thought Aral defiantly, but he said nothing.

"I know it hurts," Padma went on. "I lost friends at Escobar too."

"I know," muttered Aral. "Everyone did. Everyone lost friends. Fathers. Husbands. Sons."

"And everyone isn't crashing their lightflyer into Dendarii gorge and being dragged out of the flaming wreckage by ImpSec," Padma retorted. "Why are you?"

Aral said nothing. Any excuse he made would fail to satisfy Padma, anything he said would only make Padma dig deeper for the truth. And that was the one thing he must not do.

"Escobar was a failure, but it wasn't your failure," Padma insisted stubbornly. "Everybody knows how hard you fought against it. And you saved more lives in the end than anyone else could have. You're a hero for all of us. Why don't you see it?"

"You too?" muttered Aral, wondering what words Padma would call him if he knew the truth. Hero would not be one of them, he thought.

"You weren't like this even after Komarr," Padma went on. "You were drunk then, but you weren't suicidal." His eyes on Aral were intent, concerned, and Aral could see comprehension slowly dawning in them.

"What have you done, Aral?" asked Padma softly. "What did you do at Escobar?"

Aral turned away from his face. Padma had guessed too much already, and he could not risk giving away more. No one could know, Negri would kill anyone who found out, and Padma must not join the list of the dead. By all logic Negri should have had Aral killed long before now but he hadn't, perhaps because he was waiting for Aral to complete the job himself.

"Go away," he snapped with as much fury as he could muster in his weakened state. "I don't want you here, Padma. It's none of your business what I do or what I did. Get lost."

Aral looked up, hoping that Padma would at last be angry, that Padma would begin to hate him now. But he saw only exasperation.

"Stop making yourself repulsive in the hope that I'll go away, Aral. It's not going to work." Padma bent forward and lowered his voice. "Was it Ges?" he asked bluntly. "Did you kill him?"

Aral couldn't help himself. He laughed. And laughed. He couldn't stop it. He went on laughing helplessly until he ran out of breath and his bruised sides were aching even harder.

_Is that the worst you can think of me, Padma? That I could kill one man?_

"No," he said. "Unfortunately not."

_I killed everyone else._

He wanted desperately to tell Padma the truth. He wanted to see Padma hate him as he should. But Ezar had denied him even that, even the right to receive the reward he had earned.

"What was it, then?" asked Padma. "Something to do with this Betan woman they're all talking about? Is that it?"

Aral turned his face to the wall and did not answer. "Damn it, Aral," he heard Padma say in frustration. "I'm not going to lose you too."

Aral ignored him and drifted away into his dreams where the dead still haunted him, and they at least told him what he deserved to hear. He was dimly conscious of Padma waiting, then talking, then cursing, until eventually Padma gave up and went away.

The dead stayed behind.


End file.
